Friday, April 24, 2009

Asymmetry of Inaction

These scientists, they are driving me round the bend. The whole of mathematics, the moon, is broached by the sun, emcee of the ceremonies unfolded, the orotund tones of reality, if it carries any meaning, comes from elsewhere, the impresario walks away watched by nobody, like Hitchcock and His Cock in the movies. Consider Zeno. Not the Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism and a known homosexual, but the Zeno of Elea, the inventor of dialectical reasoning. He poses difficulties, agrees the history of two thousand and five hundred years of mathematics. Wherein lies the difficulty? One never reaches the destination, says Zeno. It’s a philosophical statement that has been dealt a thousand times by a thousand philosophers from a thousand ancient cities. Zeno differs from the others, the least dependable symbols of mathematics. Milla snatches the ball from the magical realist, Higwitta, and darts towards the Colombian goal post, the crowd, watching the amphitheatre and its gladiators, splits into two in its expression, a kind of unreality, a bewildered look, clashes with the blackened cheers, the only spectator, in the multitudinous crowd in toga, is Zeno, a stoic look. Zeno is no illusion in the crowd, the crowd is its own illusion and Milla is a running illusion.

When The Hindu announced the death of Paul Erdos, I the newspaperist and obiturist well thought of writing a poem in memory of him. The intention was there, really, but my memory failed me. The more I thought of him the more I remembered of me. This trouble could only be resolved by acknowledging my own difference from him: ‘I ain’t Paul Erdos’. Well, nobody said it before. Once I thought of myself as Gauss. My Gauss period ended with my realization that I was not Gauss and that fundamentally there was something wrong in mathematics. In my Gauss period I was addicted with finding solutions to certain mathematical riddles of high importance. I spent many nights trying to find the equation of prime numbers. My intuitive grasping of this problem centred on 2. Perhaps this was the intuitive logic: a prime number is already always flanked on either side by numbers that are divisible by 2; and hence the equation must have something to do with 2. I thought more about 2 than anything in the world. I dreamed and dreamed about 2. In fact, I fell badly in love with 2. And I fell madly in love with 22. In 22 2 is repeated 2 times. Everything that is 22 gives me intense orgasm, even Catch-22. From 22 I got much erection, but no equation. Luckily for me, my philosophical system by then had developed into such dimension and sophistication that I could do away with the luxury of mathematics altogether. Here, in this heavenly divorce lies the genius of mine, my favourite dream work.

Once as a school child he wondered at the childishness of the measuring scale. The first grand lesson of mathematics he was taught was that if n is a number in the number series then n+1 is also a number in the same sequence, which is the mathematical way of putting the idea that there is no end limit for the number series. When he studied the measuring scale carefully for the first time, he was taken aback by the falsity of the universe, milky way, solar system, earth, asia, india, kerala, thirssur, chavakkad, valappad, kazhimbrom, school and teacher; all of them were plain fuckers. In a measuring scale 10 shitless millimetres would make a centimetre and this happens in a finite distance. The trouble started when he started applying the first grand lesson of mathematics to the measuring scale. He had no problem in agreeing to the logic of the scale that 2cm is longer than 1cm. But he reasoned that there is an infinite space between 1 and 2 which cannot be spatialized on to any measuring rod. If 1.1cm is a spot on the scale it means that 1.11 is also there somewhere nearby. If 1.11 is there there is no point in denying the existence of 1.12, 1.13, 1.14, 1.15….unto infinity, like amma’s body on the beautiful frenzy day. How could he spatialize amma onto this tiny space on earth? She was infinity, the only truth of mathematics. He was crazy like crazy and crazy than crazy. So he had no idea that his thought had profound implications. He could not come into terms with the irrationality that he found with the number system packed on the scale and the perfection of measurements carried out by the very same scale. He initially thought that there was something wrong with his reasoning. A tiny error somewhere. Where was that? Was he perfect? Or was the measurement perfect?

I asked my chromosome donor about the latent meaning of the santi mantra of isovasyopanishat. It was the evening of one fine December day of 1990. One candle was ready, capturing the infinity in its flickering flame. He took an unlit candle. He pointed to the first one and said ‘That’s perfect’. Then he lit the second candle using the flame of the first one and said ‘This is perfect’. Holding the second one he told ‘perfect has been taken from perfect’. Then came the question ‘what remains then?’ which he answered by pointing to the first one ‘perfect’. It was just plain beautiful, the demonstration, but hardly capable of convincing the intellectual curiosity of the thirteen year old, failed mathematician. I construed correctly that the demonstration was more directed at a philosophical justification of his newly found fascination for Hindu ritualism, than a rational explanation of the poem. This is typical behaviour of Indian atheist in their dying days. I thought of countering him by arguing that if that had been perfect we could have saved the monies spending on candles. That would be too heavy for him.

This is how I understood him. There is an ultimate reality, which can only be conceptualized as something that cannot be conceptualized, that is, infinity. Here the definition of infinity has an exact correspondence in the desire of Parisian intellectuals’ schizophrenic drama. Yet I am not ready to suggest that both are of the same nature, because in the scheme and design of the former atheist this infinity has a will of its own whose primary motive is its own self preservation, presentation, and reproduction, which the reproduced stuff lacks. In other words, the will cannot be reproduced, the will to power—that is, the will to preservation, presentation and reproduction. The will is the supreme possessor of the will, whereas what is reproduced is a form without any content. This is how Indian atheists, at the end of the day, when they come back to our good old friend ‘patriarchal Brahminism’ and its cunt teasing ideology, justify their former life in the fast lane.

From his scheme and design I found a way out, an altogether different possibility, a labyrinthine world. Take the will from his ugly scheme, and what we get is a model which simply preserves itself; presents itself and reproduces itself. It has no will at all. It simply is, that is, you cannot say ‘thou art that’ in the way subdued atheists say, but in the sense that ‘that is that’, that is, that is simply a that. Again, you have to make some more adjustments to penetrate farther into the depths of my system, which on that wintry night was abandoned as a crazy thought. If you take infinity from infinity infinity will remain. This can be done an infinite time. This is not an anti-Platonic battle, nor the postmodern repetition without an original copy; and repetition unto infinity. In my system too I had to tackle this problem of the original copy. But I did not do that in the way adopted by the cryptic Parisian gladiators. I have always thought that originality has nothing to do with originality than time. The flux that we associate with time derives from its incessant flow towards future. We believe that if everything is destroyed time will still continue without any stop. It has no telos to achieve. This is scientifically untrue. Yes, time has a Hegelian mission to achieve, which is its own self-destruction. Time’s ultimate aim is its own murder. Time is the ultimate suicider.

I think this is not true.

I don’t believe in the existence of time in the ordinary sense of the term, nor do I believe in the time of the relativity. Science is a distorted thing. That’s why we hear a lot of quarrels these days which go by the name of academic discussions. J. Richard Gott says, with the help of his cosmic strings of infinite length travelling past one another, one can return to the home even before one starts. The central feature of these strings is the time-space distortion that they produce due to their heavy mass which ultimately enables one to travel faster than light. And here I do agree with Stephen Hawking who challenges the idea by stating that the very act of looping around the strings would cause an energy build up, which makes it impossible for the traveller to break the shackles of time. I stand for your time for the time being to systematically shatter your myths of time. The trouble with western science is that it still cannot accept that it has nothing to do with science as science is understood. It is just a myth found in an industrial society. Some myths are much more effective than others. In a post industrial society the myth that goes by the name science is most effective. But don’t try to be clever, imaging it to be the antipode of myth.

Science differs from myth in that it has the courage to say that universe does really exist for man. A slight shift in perception will help even the most positivists of all scientists to be poets.

Poets, there is a life after death, after the sublime slaughter in the desert.

Universe really does exist, if science proves if there was/is any universe, for the dead, because it is only with death that one understands the true, if again science proves if one understood/understands, dimension of time of the universe, and I can understand the true nature of science since I am, by definition, one who shares a platform with the dead, the whole mystery of death is packed in time, time is death, death is time, a hyper logic, a metastases, a malignant tumour is really all time.

Let’s start from the beginning.

XXX lies on his back, facing the malar of the sun. XXX sends a gobble of spit straight to the sun at time -1. It goes in the direction of the sun for a minute. Time 0. It stops; the vigour of earth’s pull is so much to resist. It returns, straight down. It splashes across XXX-face. A fine symbol is made at time +1. We have made the film. Now we can run it backwards. The fragmented spittle recoups into a gob. The ball move upwards at time +1; the sun is the goal. But the same dilemma at time 0. Newton created this trouble. It travels fast; it goes into the spread lips at time -1. It disappears in the cavity. Everything is fine.

Suppose time has a beginning, and indeed it has. If indeed it has is our basic premise then it is that it must be at time 0. Where does that spit come from in our film’s motions, forward as well as backward? There are two negatives and two positives. How? It must be admitted in the beginning that the time existed before time came into existence is a negative time. Or rather anti-time. And the time that runs backwards is also a negative creature. Then we have the time that runs forward with a positive being. We have the spittle at time +1. It comes from the space between the sky and the mouth. We see it from time 0 only. We do not know what happened before time 0 precisely because it is the domain of god. Before time originated there was simply anti-time where god liked to tread. Now let me modify my earlier proposition. Anti-time is no negative time. The model I presented a little while ago is a misleading one. Since the spittle does not come from the atmosphere. What is more important, the entire operation can only take place after the inception of time. So we have just a negative, the time that runs backwards. People cannot imagine beyond a point in commonsense. So we can stick on to the model without changing the nature of our initial proposition. So the point is -1 is in anti-time or beyond time or whatever you like. 0 is the beginning. +1 is a moment after its inception. Now by the classical simplistic mechanical world of Newton says that every moment can chart its history and future. Of course, it was Newton’s discredit that he introduced the concept of linear time. Absolute one. Our World is not Newton World. There is consensus. No one cares about what happens in the anti-time. Suppose it happened in the same way I presented. Is it the perfect example of history repeating itself? First as farce and then as tragedy. They say that it is not their concern. The rest is their concern. That is not my concern. Let me focus here. What if it happened in the way I deliberated? And suppose there was a negative time in the anti-time. I mean the time of shrinkage.